


dolce

by chamelenyoung



Category: GOT7
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dark Academia, M/M, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:09:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26218426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chamelenyoung/pseuds/chamelenyoung
Summary: In that moment when Jinyoung first stumbles upon Mark at the library, Mark already loves him. And why shouldn’t Mark love instinctively, when music defies the linearity of time, the physicality of space, and the sense of reason?
Relationships: Park Jinyoung/Mark Tuan
Comments: 10
Kudos: 23
Collections: Spring Blooms: MarkJin Fic Fest 2020





	dolce

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: MELLIFLUOUS/EPOCH/ETHEREAL AU: 'That person who is always in my memory. My life stuck in that period of time. You are so unreal… too delicate to touch… but I still can feel you every moment from now and forever will. I know you are there… you are real.' (for @praenotpray on Twitter) (beta-ed by ashlina on AFF)

Jinyoung's thoughts disperse into the fathomless depths of the library, books crammed into looming columns of overladen shelves. Each book encases a private world: a separate awareness it yearns to tell, if only you would crack open its spine and let it whisper to you.

Those faded whispers of paper secured the walls of Jinyoung’s world, were everything that his soul enmeshed to - until that day.

Jinyoung's recollection of that afternoon lingers the way words from a poem, fresh off his tongue, might expand into the air of a room. It sticks to him, like a decrescendo reverberating between particles of darkness - whispering, without fading.

Decluttering duty in the archival wing of the library: his assignment is simple enough. Lay to rot those mirrored disks, dialed machines, those tiny spools of black tape cased in plastic boxes. These are artifacts that no one uses, or remembers how to use, and it doesn’t matter because they feed no knowledge to the world of syntax, form, and sentence structure. Besides, they're cramped for space as it is.

Jinyoung releases a sigh. All this dust must have coated every recess of his being by now. He leans a hip against a wooden desk, a cobwebbed monstrosity that has somehow outlasted the Catacalysm and all the librarians since. Jinyoung is impatient to shut the archive doors on all this grime and return to his cleaner musings on language philosophy. But when he pushes off from the desk too quickly, a faint ring shivers in his ears, and Jinyoung pauses.

The sound freezes Jinyoung, not because it's louder than the unspoken noise limit of this library, but because the tremor in its pitch jars him, jolts him more than any memory of thought in those books he reads all day.

It's a dissonant noise, a muffled hum - and Jinyoung realizes what he had mistaken for a table was, in fact, an instrument, ancient and decaying.

It has never before occurred to Jinyoung to entertain curiosity for these items of the past. Why should he spare attention for these mortal objects, when words immortalize everything about them - their conceptions, productions, their histories?

But something even Jinyoung can’t put to words spurs him to slide his hand under the rim of the table, searching for a key.

He locates the bony bit of metal and twists it into the brass keyhole, to no avail: the lock has rusted shut. Mouth pressed thin, Jinyoung makes his choice, fitting his hands into the grooves of the wood to force the lid up.

A sharp snap releases the rust-eaten metal of the lock, and with a groaning creak, the cover heaves open.

And the bursts of chords and snappy rhythms that wrench itself from the crumbling piano sings of so much unrestrained freedom and elation, Jinyoung can't help but listen for more.

The yellowing keys of the piano then release another curious, untuned refrain: three notes in the headspace of the seventh octave - a question.

"Jinyoung," he finds himself answering. "I’m a librarian here."

In stolen pockets of time, Jinyoung sneaks down to this forgotten corner of the library, at first to listen in wonder, and later on with tomes of his own favorites under his arm. He does something he never does: he recites passages in a voice rough from disuse, to the attentive air. "This isn't what I usually read," he pulls out a volume of post-modern poetry, "But I thought you might like the rhythms."

“Mark.” He reads the name out of an old Italian novel one day, and knows it has to be right. The name hardly falls from Jinyoung’s lips when a brush of wind chimes, like a thousand pinpricks of stars, floods his senses. Mark - derived from Marcus - from Mars, the god of war and passion. The chimes build to stauncher bells, cymbals, and percussion - all lifting with Mark's fervent delight in finding a way to express his identity in Jinyoung’s language, in _words_. His joy sears with a metallic brightness that almost hurts Jinyoung’s ears.

Jinyoung’s eardrums vibrate with reverberations of sound several hours later. He hears music for a day - or at least, thinks he does: the creak of the bookcase ladder, syncopated with the hum of the lighting, paralleled in the harmony of Jieun's waterfall of hair as she turns. Jinyoung's never quite been the same since.

Jisoo shoots him odd looks and drags him off to the Mindbinder to get his head checked. By the next afternoon, everything returns to the background murmur of turning paper and sliding book spines he's known for eons.

"That’s the way it’s meant to be, isn’t it?" Jieun frowns when she catches Jinyoung scowling at her hair. When words and books represented their purpose for existing, they hoard them in hushed reverence.

A week later, Jinyoung returns to the archival wing, to find the shelves and artifacts cleared, and the pianoforte vanished. Cold fingers of fear seize Jinyoung to the core.

He hazards a query at Jaebeom, one of the older librarians. "What are you talking about, Jinyoung?" Jaebeom’s already stern face seems to harden more. "What piano? You were tossing out moldy old copies of librettos for a week - don't know what took you so long. Do you need to see the Mindbinder again? Did the mold spores get to you?"

But even as his heart breaks, Jinyoung can't help but cling to an inkling of hope. When it comes to Mark, he can believe in magic. And a few days later, Jinyoung's faith rewards him, because when he loses his grip on a hardbound volume, the whoosh of the falling pages sounds like a fluttering of heartbeats. It sings to him, and Jinyoung laughs.

From then on, Mark sticks to Jinyoung - not in the way fabric sticks to sweaty skin, but the way memory embraces consciousness. He is a reminder, as Jinyoung shelves and re-categorizes history, his thin energy never quite collecting enough density for Jinyoung to grasp.

Words attach to language and fix resolutely to meaning. But music and sound exist in their own dimensions – plunging into balmy saltwater and soaring into moonlight in the same instant - and Jinyoung has no choice but to be blissfully pulled along by the raw, unprocessed sensation of it.

They start to visit each other in dreams. Mark plays him lullabies, rippling over sleek keys like water. “Lovely,” Jinyoung breathes, as Mark overlays gossamer-thin textures of sound with a touch so tender, Jinyoung knows they’re only meant for him.

Mark's laughter echoes pure, and his smiles run sweet. Jinyoung's so sure of that distinctive tone of sweetness, that he daydreams in Latin wordstems and every other combination of language he can use to invent the right vocabulary to describe it.

That moment in the archives when they first stumbled upon each other - when Mark first realized how to make himself exist to Jinyoung - Mark had already loved Jinyoung. Mark hadn't expressed it in so many words, but Jinyoung had heard it in the push of the strings, the breathlessness of his tempo, the trill of the piccolos at an altitude higher than Jinyoung could have ever imagined from bookreading alone.

And why wouldn’t Mark fall instantly, when music refuses to adhere to the linearity of time, the physicality of space, or the sense of reason? Mark might have first known Jinyoung now, years later, or long ago. Long ago, he might have held fast to a thread of Jinyoung's fate, before the Cataclysm smashed Jinyoung’s life force inextricably into this nameless library. But none of that matters now, because right now, Jinyoung is listening to Mark.

And Mark listens back, hears the turns of the language and clever word plays Jinyoung revels in, and learns to be playful, too. He whispers sounds so low and vibratory, so heart-quickening and tenuous, it sends tingles down the length of Jinyoung's spine. Jinyoung spends the entire day shaky and on a tightrope, hating Mark for rendering him so boneless, but not willing him to stop.

Seohyun takes one look at Jinyoung’s feverish state and purses her lips. "I thought you grew out of that phase, Jinyoung," she shakes her head in disapproval, and lobs an atlas of human anatomy at him, as if that will cool his oversensitized nerves.

Later that night, Jinyoung flips through those colorized pages - complete with pictures of formaldehyde-pickled specimen - and thinks to himself. Sixty seconds, sixty heartbeats. He imagines the way blood sifts through flesh, how smaller than small particles of life can constantly flux, right under skin, on an invisible timer. Maybe it's a little macabre, but what is life, if not a little visceral?

After the Great Cataclysm, so many factions dissolved, so many lives divided, so many spirits dispersed - who was he to say that the living only inhabited the memory of flesh and blood?

It's been a long time since Jinyoung's thought of the visceral.

Seohyun, for all her well-meaning intentions, can’t possibly know the feeling - that sweetness that sneaks in with the draft slipping under his door. A strain, melodious and mercurial, brushing the back of his neck, sliding tortuously lower, until Jinyoung shivers with the heat that rolls inside him. He senses a brush, a suggestion of touch on his mouth, _pianissimo_ , of undressing, a centimeter at a time, so as not to disturb the delicate, delicious tension in the air, caresses so soft and immaterial it leaves Jinyoung drunk and aching.

He absently wonders what it would feel like, to stand under the sky.

“The sky, Jinyoung?” Jaebeom splutters, hardly able to produce his next sentence. His voice almost rises enough to disturb the lethargic hush of the bookstacks. “Have you fucking lost your senses? The sky?”

Jinyoung sighs. He regrets asking.

“What does the _sky_ feel like? You have - every - authoritative - text - since the advent of - language -”

Each phrase punctuates with another book Jaebeom has pulled from the shelves in indignation, throwing volumes into arms Jinyoung has no choice but to outstretch. _A Celestial Universe. Cloud Atlas. The Western Sun. Storms and Where to Find Them._ Jinyoung will have to reshelve them later.

“You don’t have to wonder, Jinyoung. _Read_ and you will already know.”

But Jinyoung doesn’t want to know the exact positioning of the stars, the gaseous ingredients of the air, or how hot the sun smolders in centigrade. He wants to feel the world outside these paper walls, whatever its state of existence. He wants to feel the rush of wind through an orchestra of brittle leaves, hear how it sounds different if the sun releases sweat from the back of his neck, or if the moon bathes silver into his skin.

Jinyoung wonders if it will feel like Mark holding him, lightly, by the edges of his being, almost as afraid of touching him as Jinyoung is of sliding right through.

The next morning, spots of Jinyoung’s neck dissolve where Mark had fluttered grazing touches, and Jinyoung has his collar up high to hide the blemishes.

“I think,” Jisoo says carefully, staring pointedly, “You should stop reading all those fantasy novels. They mess with your head.”

“I think you’re being possessed.” Jae plainly informs him. He brightens, "I saw some restored exorcism texts in the religion section; want to give them a peruse?"

Jinyoung declines, and doesn't remind him that it's them, these bookkeepers, who haunt this library.

Instead, he listens to Mark, who never plays him anything heavy or dark - because he's had enough of that in this library - who elicits every new emotion Jinyoung adds to his personal lexicon of possibility. And Jinyoung doesn’t doubt for a minute it’s all real.

He closes his eyes and feels the beat of a snare like a pulse in his chest, the rippling brass saturating an undercurrent of violas, and those clean piano notes that ask questions, soothe him, make love to him.

Jinyoung knows it’s all real, because if he leans in and listens close enough to the low pitches of the atmosphere, he can hear the sound of Mark’s voice.

* * *

It's Mark’s voice that makes it harder, lately, for dreams and dream-like encounters to be enough. It's getting harder for Jinyoung not to notice that as Mark breathes in, he breathes Jinyoung out. It's harder for Jinyoung to restrain from freeing himself into the music between them, from disappearing into Mark, from letting himself go.

Jinyoung doesn’t understand - when language composes its own meter and rhythm, what distinguishes it, what separates it from the notes of a song? What renders the music of instruments so palpable yet incorporeal?

Mark hovers with concern, a gravely register of flute, between the empty spaces on Jinyoung's skin that he's kissed away. They take longer to fill in again each time.

Jinyoung's soul pulls at the sound, almost willing him to remember - why is he so sure that he's heard it before?

Or maybe - they haven't figured out how to fit together yet.

That's what Jinyoung tells himself, as he listens to Mark contemplating the shape of his soul - compressing his sounds and transposing his key - as if changing the shape of his piece will fit it into Jinyoung's puzzle better.

Or perhaps they are both moving targets, limitless or nothing, forever floating, waiting with an arm outstretched across things that will never be clear, so unbounded by reality that they wonder if -

**Author's Note:**

> hello markjin fans ;-; here is my flowery and unorthadox (?) interpretation of this prompt - hope you enjoy~


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